I am wrapping up my 30th year, which just so happens to have been a really, really good one.

I am extra humbled and grateful for this fact, because a good portion of my life up until the past few years was spent dealing with a significant amount of bullshit. Depression, abuse, isolation, severe anxiety, anorexia, bulimia, so much time on the elliptical that I forgot what it was like to have friends.

I spent a good deal of my teens feeling like no one in the world gave a shit about me. Much of my 20’s were spent freaking the fuck out, because how was it possible to live a good life with such a general cloak of persistent grief? I was convinced that I came from circumstances. The kind of circumstances that made it so that it wasn’t possible for me to be calm or happy. My eating disorder was the absolute pinnacle of that belief.

My rules, my calorie counting, my weighing and measuring, my food journal, my every-single-day-no-matter-what exercise gave me things to do when I felt there was nothing else to do. The control of my body was soothing, a total fucking life raft in the midst of a big terrible ocean. I truly felt that I needed food restriction and body scrutiny to survive, because it gave me what I thought was the closest thing to peace.

By the time my eating disorder started I had spent decades looking outward to find a way to feel like I was noticeable and valuable, and in some sense, the insanity gave me that feeling. By the time I realized that my behavior wasn’t sustainable or smart or interesting, the habits were deeply entrenched in my daily activities. I quickly realized that in order to make changes, I first had to get out of my own way.

Maybe you feel stuck in behavior patterns you don’t like, or you wonder why you can’t be happy, or you don’t trust yourself to succeed. That’s okay. I felt that way for a long time too, and much of the work of my recovery was finding ways to change my mind about myself.

To do the same, I suggest you:

Be gentle: If you feel stuck in thought patterns or behaviors that you don’t know how to get rid of, it is probably for a reason. I think the dialogue about habit change is both privileged and flawed, in the sense that it doesn’t take into account things like race, class, or brain chemistry. If you want to live a brilliant and joyful life and you’re totally fucking broke, working a billion hours a week doing something you hate to just scrape by, it is likely that you will be a little fucking depressed. If your body is simply not making enough serotonin, it is likely that your brain will be impacted. There are all sorts of totally uncontrollable factors that mess with our health and happiness, and I encourage you to be extremely gentle with yourself while you navigate around them.

Even if you simply have a habit of perpetual fear or constant and nagging feelings of unworthyness, those things are deeply entrenched and won’t go away over night. Go slow when getting out of your own way. Take little steps and don’t be a dick to yourself when it doesn’t work out right away. It’s okay. You’re still going to succeed in little ways, all the time.

Be disciplined: Discipline is different for everyone. For me it means I set an early alarm, often rising before the sun, so that I can do personal things (exercise, eat wonderful food, study my text books, meditate, write a gratitude list) as well as work my ass off for Super Strength Health. It ALSO means I am DILIGENT about my rest days from exercise, I ALWAYS sleep 8-9 hours, I DEMAND one meal a week out of the house and somewhere special, and I generally don’t work after I eat my dinner. I am disciplined in terms of my productivity, but I know that tasks will simply expand to meet the time allowed, so I also must be disciplined about my off time too. I find it extremely helpful to make a calendar for myself and to try to stick to it. In the past I have viewed myself as generally lazy, and taking the time to stick to a structure has been a huge part of letting myself be both accomplished and happy. It feels good!

Be confidant: This might take the most work of all, but it is so worth the effort. At some point I realized I was totally ashamed of my eating and exercise behaviors, specifically, so I had to change them in order to gain self-esteem. This took YEARS, and I consistently had to go back to my first suggestion (be gentle!) when I faltered. Confidence doesn’t come immediately, but a good start is to try to have integrous action most of the time, and to start saying nice things to yourself. Just telling myself that I think I am rad and smart on a daily basis has been tremendously helpful. It’s the little things!

Take risks: I honestly think that taking risks has made me be more confidant (as opposed to confidence allowing me to take more risk). Sometimes a good old dash of “I didn’t believe I could do XYZ, but I did it anyway” is totally appropriate and excellent.

Get grateful: Getting grateful for your circumstance is one thing you could do, but getting grateful for yourself is actually what I mean when I suggest this step. YOU, all on your own, want to get out of your own way, to accomplish shit and to feel good about yourself. YOU are taking the steps to enjoy your life. YOU are curious what it would be like to feel like you are killin’ it at living your life. A lot of people choose to never push themselves past what they already know. Be grateful for yourself, your intention and your effort.

I have received a few emails lately about how to cope with stress. The stress of the holidays, the stress of the economy, the stress of rent prices, and political upheaval and food and family. I’ve been asked again and again how to handle life when it feels like an onslaught, and luckily my life has been incredibly busy as of late, too, and I have an amazing amount of experience with not coping very well in the past, and doing mostly fine in the present. This is a subject I feel I have a bit to say about.

First:

I am here for you. I am here for you if you are my client or if you are my reader, or if you just stumbled across this blog for the first time. I think it is really important to let you know that we, the stressed out, creative, intense people of the world have each other’s backs. You do not have to be your only resource! You don’t have to hold every single thing together for yourself 100% of the time.

And now:

Sometimes, for me, I can move so fast, and feel so panicked, that it’s like the disasters are pre-meditated. Whether it’s an unexpected bill or a broken car or the mortification of public vulnerability, it’s like every once in awhile I feel set to fail. Little disasters add up, and it’s easy for me to freak the fuck out.

I lived a lot of my life in exactly this panicked state, and no matter how much I wanted to “just be happy”, I couldn’t find it in me. I was deeply entrenched in riding a constant stress wave, and I attached the only solidly good feelings I could find to accomplishments (my Bachelor’s degree, my Masters, Art shows, public accolades) and weight loss. I used food restriction and excessive exercise as a means to cope with the fact that not one fucking thing in my life was actually seriously in my control. I felt overwhelmed and broken and what recognition I got and how my body was perceived were what I had to work with to feel on top of my shit.

We all know that doesn’t actually work long term, though, right?

When I decided I wasn’t going to use things that don’t actually matter to feel good anymore, I suddenly had NO ANCHOR and it was truly terrible. Letting go of my big coping mechanisms, the only things that worked on some level to make me feel okay, made me feel like a billowy shirt hung out to dry on a windy day, without a clothes pin. One moment I was flying in the sky and the next I was a wrinkled ball in the grass.

Luckily, at some point I realized (by trial and error and by consistently getting back at it each time I failed) that I CAN and DID find new anchors. I anchored to my creativity and to my friends at first and then to my alone time, because I discovered I didn’t need to fear silence and space.

I discovered that the simple feeling of a non-anxious good time was a miracle. Once I realized that, I tried to find little minutes of the feeling again and again.

SO. deep breath.

What makes you feel really happy?

Today I sang Miss World by Hole for two hours. No one was home in my house, and no one in my house would probably enjoy my grunge throwback, and I happily took the opportunity to belt it the fuck out. It was stupid. It was repetitive. It was, by all means, boring. But it also made me incredibly happy; to practice with my voice and to be loud and to hear what I sound like. I have always thought I was a terrible singer, but today I decided I’m kinda good with practice, which I had literally not once given myself the opportunity to do before age 30. Seemed like kind of a big deal.

In essence, what I was doing was a waste of time. My room was kind of messy, and I haven’t been blogging as much lately, which i definitely feel a responsibility to do, but I was REALLY happy. I liked the opportunity to get down with my self, and since I am a busy person with a lot of deep responsibility, I don’t often have the chance. I was feelin’ it, and I was letting myself.

Q: I am struggling with taking days off of exercise. Do you take regular rest days? If you do take rest days, do you eat less when you do? How do you deal with the lack of endorphins and get through the day?

A: First and foremost:

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s move forward.

There is a very special slice of the population that actually struggles with taking days off from exercise, as opposed to getting in the gym and working up a good sweat. I am TOTALLY, 100%, COMPLETELY one of these people, and I am here to tell you that, YES, I take 1-2 days of rest per week, but that has definitely not always been the case.

Let’s flash back to the year 2009. I only took two days off of exercise for that entire year. Those two days were because 1) it was Christmas and 2) I had food poisoning. In that year I lied to exercise, I skipped out on hang-outs with friends to exercise, I did crunches on bathroom floors, I prioritized exercise over adequate sleep. (I also exclusively exercised for one hour exactly, on the elliptical only. FUN TIMES). I can count that year as the most isolated and miserable time of my life, as well as the year that my quads were always cramped in a claw of tight pain and my arms were like string beans. I was basically having no fucking fun whatsoever because of my obsession with exercise, and I let the belief that I “had” to exercise in my very specific way EVERY SINGLE DAY govern the structure of my life.

At first, my struggle was simply to get off the elliptical because I hated it with a firey passion that could not be paralleled. Spin classes helped, running helped, hiking helped, the Insanity workout helped. Just getting out of my routine and discovering ways to use my body joyfully snapped me out of the elliptical hell that had become so normal. That was the first step toward waking up.

Slowly, from there, I took baby steps toward rest days. Sometimes the spin classes I wanted to take didn’t fit into my school schedule (It wasn’t until I entered graduate school that I made myself a promise that I would not, under any circumstances, ditch class to exercise. Sorry undergrad!). The Insanity workout (which I eventually followed religiously) had a chill yoga day and a rest day built right in to the program, which admittedly horrified me.

In the beginning, these days that I was forced to rest kicked up my mental calculator. I would try to dwindle down my eating, I would make myself food plans that included a whole lot of r-e-s-t-r-i-c-t-i-o-n. My rest days would totally freak me out. I would cry, and I would snap at my loved ones. That was probably the worst thing of all.

Eventually, I figured out that actually, what I had going on was a serious problem and it had a name. I was an exercise addict, and I wasn’t okay with that. I had seen addiction unravel my family (alcohol and drugs with my father, chronic negative body image and dieting with my grandmother) and I didn’t want to be another cog in that wheel. Once I categorized my obsession with exercise as an addiction, I could take steps to replace the compulsion with more positive, self serving expressions of my self. The shift in my mindset was huge.

At first my rest days were all about walks and yoga, which is still, you know, exercise. I considered that time to be my weaning off period, knowing that I didn’t want to quit my daily habit cold turkey, but that I wanted to start building a path away from my addictive behavior. I started to ask myself “what would I do if I wasn’t an exercise addict?” and surprisingly, I had a ton of things that could be taking up my time. As a person who identified almost primarily as a person who exercises, this was a revelation.

Through trial and error I discovered that I could take days off of exercise without much physical change. Bodies are smart and bodies are also resilient, not to mention that if the body I had (which I chronically hated, by the way) meant that I had to do something I despised every single day, than I supposed I didn’t want that body. Huh. Go figure.

Today, I still walk or do yoga on rest days sometimes, but now only if it feels nourishing to my body and my mind. (It has to be both. If I think yoga will just soothe my mind’s anxiety about not exercising, but my body is exhausted, then I don’t get to do it. Thems the rules.) Eventually, my rest days became all about devoting myself completely to my projects, so much so that I don’t even remember that at one point I thought I absolutely had to exercise daily. I was never able to lose myself in writing or making things when exercise was running my life. Finding the ability today is a generous gift that I gave myself through doing some seriously hard work. I do not take it for granted.

In addition to making things, I try to see people I care about, make phone calls to people who I can’t easily see, smooch my dude, or scheme something cool. If I am feeling particularly antsy, I try to help someone else. Sometimes just offering a listening ear to a friend takes me out of an impulse to sprint (or lift, or backbend, or bike). Quitting it with the exercise addiction made me a significantly better friend.

On rest days, I sleep in. I get massages. I smell my neighbors roses. I play in my garden.

My body consistently thanks me for rest days. Once I got to the schedule of taking a couple of them per week inflammation went down all over my body. I wasn’t hobbeling around all the time, crippled by soreness. I looked more toned, and my body fat percentage went down. Exercise is stress on your body, and when you’re doing it constantly without giving it the ability to recover, your body will inevitably get pissed off and confused. Everything will work better when you chill, even aesthetically.

Lastly, I no longer feel the need to forcibly change the way I eat on rest days. I consistently eat in a way that I am proud of (delicious, nutritious, nourishing, calorically-dense-enough food that is often grown right in my neighborhood) and by golly, any time is a good time to eat those foods. If I take a more extended time off of exercise, I am less hungry without needing to try to be, and I eat less naturally. The idea of restricting yourself after one day of rest won’t be helpful and is kind of like flipping your body the bird. Your body will tell you what it needs, I promise. Just trust it!

Exercise addiction is seriously scary and painful. Obviously, I still exercise, and I still consider it an important part of my life. The difference is, I don’t exercise because I’m scared not to anymore- and seriously, you don’t have to either. Life is chock full of amazing shit to see and do, and anything keeping you from experiencing these things fully is not worth keeping around. Now get out there into the world, and own it. Your life is worth significantly more than how much you sweat.